Category Archives: Robotics

Empathy Swarm meets Sophia and Pepper – almost. We are looking forward to discuss how our non-anthropomorphic robot swarm can produce a feeling of Empathy with some humanoid robots in the audience at the festival Meta Marathon 2019 – Robotics.

42 hours non-stop living and working with robots, coexisting and cooperating, celebrating and drinking, loving and laughing: The META Marathon 2019 from March 15-17, 2019 is dedicated to the topic of robotics and transforms the NRW-Forum into a real laboratory for a whole weekend.

We are looking forward to the first weeks of January and our 9-day DEX -Design EXperimentation – workshop with students from Chulalongkorn University. Under the title “Technology sublime – Preventative medicine for a dystopian future.” architectural students learn about the basics of sensors and electronics to create a kind of activated architecture or a little companion that reacts to environmental stimuli from light to CO2 levels, while thinking about the larger picture and a scenario of how sensed data and a creative mechanism can help the world.

We just wanted to share some more impressions of the scale of this state of the project: 10 robots – that’s a lot of parts!!! And even some of the SMD parts are still in boxes as they would just get lost with a size of half a millimeter x a millimeter!!

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

With the dear help of professor Zorislav Šojat from Ruđer Bošković Institute, Zagreb, we finally managed to make the robots smooth and silent. 🙂

Learning about interrupt functions to get the update rates of the WiFi communication and the sending of PWM values to the brushless DC motors independent of each other!

See Robertina and Kryten rolling smoothly on the grey “NASA” floor of the studio, while the prototyping of the next generation is in full work mode
– 10 robots to be seen soon, with new body and battery management!

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The work is coproduced at Kontejner within the framework of EMAP / EMARE and co-funded by Creative Europe.

Currently we are working on making our Robot Swarm perceive humans. The vision sense of our robot is a camera; the robot sees its environment, but that alone is not enough. The robot needs to learn to differentiate a bit more.

Previously we used Python and could already detect emotions, but to be more flexible and have the possibility to have more control, we are porting our coding environment to c++.

With the goal to respond to human emotions the primary goal is to detect faces. In order to teach Robertina to identify a human face, we use the computer vision and machine learning libraries OpenCV and dllib.

And see what she can already perceive: That’s Adam and me and she can identify two heads and amazingly also our so called facial landmarks that play a relevant role in her future ability to actually perceive emotions!

Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel’s analog overhead projector animations were already used in 1944 to demonstrate how easy it is for the observer’s brain to associate emotional attachment to inanimate objects and how our human brain is hard wired for compassion.

Empathy Swarm will transplant this from a digital to a physical environment by creating a swarm of robots that as a whole can adapt its behavior and interacts with the observer’s emotional feedback.